This past fall I had the opportunity to work on designing and prototyping a physical product to experiment with multimodal experience design as part of the MSHFID program at Bentley University.
The concept borrows from “rubber duck” debugging, for a desk assistant that leans into the trend for purpose-built offline products.
Without needing any bluetooth, wifi, or other connectivity Desk Buddy offers a host of productivity and wellness features:
- Customizable ambient lighting
- Focus/task timers
- Breathing exercises (with light-based visualization)
- CO2 level detection
- White noise / coffeeshop ambience sound machine
- Reactive lighting level detection
- 100% offline voice recognition for hands-free control
The process
For concept renderings, I started with typical AI photo generation, but was not happy with the results. I knew the style I wanted, so instead I hooked up Claude Desktop to Blender’s MCP server enabling me to generate the 3D scene through prompting.
Once the basics were in place, I was able to tweak and tune textures and lighting to achieve exactly the vibe I wanted.
Next, I did some lo-fi foam prototyping to figure out initial dimensions and finally 3D printed a base once dimensions were locked down.
This version has a bigger base than my renderings to accommodate the full Arduino and breadboard, but with a custom PCB it would be achievable to get much closer to the concept rendering dimensions.